


It's Not Much (but I will share it with you)

by hallow777



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: F/F, Homeless AU, drug mention, drug tw
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-10-04
Updated: 2015-10-08
Packaged: 2018-04-24 17:04:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4927867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hallow777/pseuds/hallow777
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After her father dies, Laura's mother falls back into some old habits that leave Laura homeless and jobless and just when Laura thinks that it's never going to get better, she finds herself befriending a dark and broody girl who is only doing marginally better than herself.</p><p>Between the two of them they don't have much, but together maybe they can make something wonderful.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I've read through most of the fanfics on here that have caught my interest- I'm actually making my second round back through everything now- and I've seen a lot of homeless!Carmilla fics which I love but it got me thinking what about a homeless!Laura fic? Wouldn't that be fun?

When ten year old Laura Hollis imagined herself at twenty, she saw herself in college pursuing an art degree. By age fifteen, Laura realized that her passion for journalism outweighed her passion for art and art became just a hobby while she instead dreamed about majoring in journalism.

At age eighteen, just as she was about to go off to college, she started to realize maybe that wouldn’t come true either. Her father passed away in a car accident leaving her with only her mother to support her. She was an adult now but her father had always made sure school was her first priority, never letting her get more than just a summer job and making sure she was taken care of financially as she prepared to go off to college. Once he passed, her mother saw fit to use the money for other things.

But that was okay, Laura dealt with it the best she could and got a part time job before she headed to college, trying to save up a little spending money. Her father had been saving for college since she was born so she knew she wouldn’t have to worry about paying for college itself.

Moira Hollis was taking the death of her husband hard, or at least that’s what Laura assumed as she became distant. Their relationship wasn’t always the most caring, Moira tended to let Jack do most of the parenting as he was overprotective enough for the both of them so Moira was always just there. Not a big part of her life but just there. Now though, Laura rarely saw her mother. She just assumed she was always out working so Laura tried to keep to herself, dealing with the death of her father as well as she could and spent most of her time either with her friends or working part time.

It never occurred to her that her college money was dwindling away, little by little.

The money was specifically for college but Jack Hollis wanted to make sure that Laura could get into the money if she ever needed it in an emergency, she knew the log ins to the bank account and thankfully she thought to check it before she went to write the check for the school because while there were thousands of dollars in it before, now only a little remained.

Laura couldn’t ever remember a time where she had actually gotten mad at her mother, she was mostly just an impartial figure in her life but there were only three people in the world who knew about this account- other than the bank people themselves- and with her father being, well, dead, there was only one other person who could have taken the money.

She waited for her mother to get home that night and asked her about the money, demanding to know where it went and even though Laura had been so mad, Moira just looked at her with wide teary eyes and said they needed it for bills that she couldn’t pay with just her small salary. 

It didn’t really make sense to Laura because that was a lot of money but she couldn’t stand to see her own mother cry and had given up on it, thinking she could apply for financial aid and go to college next year. Even if it set her plans back a year and she wouldn’t get to go to college with her friends, it would be okay. It wasn’t like any of them were planning to stay in dorms anyway, they were all going to go to the college in town so she would still get to see them even if she wasn’t going to class with them.

Near the end of her nineteenth year of life, Laura burst into her parent’s old room to have a stern talking to to her mother about all the past due bills they were getting when she had deposited money in the bank just yesterday but what she saw shocked her. 

But it also made everything click into place.

All through her childhood, Laura had been fascinated by the stories her father told her about how he met her mother. He toned it down when she was a child but as she got older her told her the whole story about how he ran into her mother when she was living on the streets as a drug addict but then they had fallen in love and she’d gotten clean for him and stayed clean so that they could have a family together.

Now though, it seems her mother had fallen back into old habits. So much for the so called “monster” of the story turning good when she fell in love and was loved in return, huh?

That night was their biggest fight ever and ended with Laura literally being run out of the house but some scary druggie friends of her mother. She spent a week staying with Danny, wearing clothes that were way too large for her but at least she still had her work uniform since she had been wearing it that night.

She thought her mother just needed time to cool down and then they could talk about this rationally, maybe get her mother the help she clearly needed. After all, she beat it once, she could do it again, right?

After a week, she went back home only to find the same treatment. The only difference was this time she was at least allowed to collect her stuff before she was chased out the door again.

She tried calling the police, telling them her mother was doing hard drugs in the house and could very well be selling and/or making them there too but either the police didn’t find anything, or they didn’t bother to look in the first place. Either way, it meant there was really no hope of her living in her childhood home again. Almost everything she had to remember her father by was gone.

She couch surfed for a while, rotating between Danny, Lafontaine, and Perry’s houses but she knew she couldn’t keep this up forever, she couldn’t keep burdening them like that. Her friends had started college by this point and Danny was rooming with some other Summer Society sisters- Danny had instantly been welcomed into their group- and while they welcomed Laura at first when she explained what was going on, she knew she was bothering them now. Plus, they tended to throw parties at all times of the day and when your bedroom was basically the couch in the living room where the parties were normally thrown, it didn’t make for a good time.

Perry lived in a small little studio apartment near campus, her parents had never really been in the picture but they still sent her money and supported her so she could go to college worry free. She lived by herself and was kind enough to let Laura stay with her but Laura knew that even though she tried to keep things neat and tidy, it was never neat enough for Perry and that Laura just being there disrupted Perry’s normal cleaning habits and it bothered the ginger girl though she would never say anything.

Lafontaine lived with their parents who really did like Laura and were always trying to help her in some way and Laura did get along with them really well but Lafontaine was always away at their new lab in the bio department at school and when Laura wasn’t working, she spent a lot of awkward time with Lafontaine’s parents. Which was something she could deal with if she had to, she didn’t mind spending time with them it was just that without Lafontaine there she just felt guilty. After all, it was Lafontaine who said that she could stay there, not their parents.

But she was making it through, she still had money coming in and soon she would have enough for a small apartment. She even had her eye on one. It wasn’t much but it was cheap and it would do the job and even though she’d been watching this listing for a couple months now, no one had snatched it up yet. Which probably meant there was something wrong with it but it didn’t matter, she would make do.

She could do this.

She had to. She didn’t have much other choice.

Then came the fateful day that she walked into work and found out that she was being replaced by a perky blonde who clearly had no problem stuffing herself into a push up bra and a tight uniform shirt and showing off to all the gross customers that walked into the crappy dinner she waitressed at. 

She spent another two weeks couch hopping and desperately searching for a new job, willing to take really anything that would come her way but with no luck.

With no job and no hope, Laura made a decision.

She couldn’t keep depending on her friends like this anymore, even though they would absolutely not let her go through with what she had planned if they knew, they would rather she keep depending on them but she just couldn’t take the burden on her conscious that that was. 

So she packed up what little belongings she still had- it all fit in one oversized backpack due to her constant moving from couch to couch- and convinced her friends she had gotten in touch with a long lost aunt that lived a little ways out of town that was willing to take her in for a while. They were all skeptical but they all knew what kind of situation Laura was in so if she didn’t have an aunt, then what was she going to do, sleep on the streets? In the end, they believed her.

So at age twenty, Laura found herself in a situation that was so far off from what she had dreamed of as a child. How naive had she been then? Thinking she’d be off having the time of her life at college now?

When the reality was that she was freezing her ass off in the cold night air, curled up with the blanket she had brought from Lafontaine’s house in the corner of a very drafty and very damp partly collapsed building she had once snuck into on a dare in middle school. She didn’t know how long she could keep this up but if she could at least give her friends a break from having to support her, it would be worth it.

At least here, she didn’t have to deal with the looks of pity they shot her when they thought she wasn’t looking. She knew they just wanted to help, but it still hurt.


	2. Chapter 2

Being truly homeless was different than what she’d expected but maybe it had something to do with the fact that she had a little bit of time to prepare before it happened, she didn’t think many people had that chance. 

So far, while things weren’t exactly great, things were decent so far. Things were falling into place like she expected. She had had time to find out what resources her city had and how often she could use them and other similar things. 

She thought she would be bored with nothing to do but she felt like she was busier than ever now. Laura definitely did not want to live like this any longer than she had to so she was usually going around town, asking about jobs and spending a lot of her time using the computer at the library to submit applications online. Some of her time during the morning was also spent sleeping. The nights were cold and she didn’t really feel safe sleeping in the abandoned house at night so she found it easier to sleep during the day but it normally lasted until about lunch time as that’s normally when the school kids started skipping classes and hanging out at her new “home” so she had to make sure she was gone by then. 

At night, she mostly spent her time reading from books she checked out of the library. Usually once a night though, she found herself down at the gym. One of the best pieces of advice she’d read somewhere was to use what little money she had left to get a membership to a twenty four hour gym. It worked out great so far, she picked a slightly more questionable place than she would have if she was actually going to work out there but so far no one seemed to question her when she would show up at three in the morning to shower and check on the things she was leaving in the locker there. 

On the plus side, no one really came to the gym that late at night and there was definitely no one in the women’s locker room to notice how every few days she cycled out the clothes in her locker, storing clean ones and removing the dirty ones so she could run over to Perry’s to do her laundry the next day. 

That was another life saver there, she couldn’t afford to spend all her money washing her clothes at the laundromat so she’d spun a tale about how her aunt’s washing machine wasn’t working and Perry was quick to offer to let her use her’s. Plus, it gave her a chance to catch up with her friends and keep up the lie she was living.

Those days she went back there were the hardest to leave. It may have been her choice to stop living with them but there wasn’t a day she didn’t wish things were back to normal or at least better. Just a roof that was actually her’s would be nice at this point. A roof she could go back to at anytime, not just from about four am till noon when no one was around.

But seeing as she still hadn’t found a job, that wasn’t likely to happen anytime soon. It was now week two of her official homelessness and she’d only gotten one call back from a job but even then, it didn’t work out. It was more of a formality than anything. 

She was starting to wonder if paying for this “pay as you go” phone was worth it or not but at least she would have it in an emergency and she occasionally used it to keep up with her friends but she couldn’t afford to waste too many minutes. Her funds were dwindling quickly. Maybe some day, she’d actually get a call back from a job.

A girl could dream, right?

Even less likely, she thought she might get something in the mail but even though Perry let her know anytime something came in the mail for her- Perry was still letting her use her address as her mailing address which came in handy since her fictional aunt didn’t exactly have a mailing address she could use- but there was no luck there either. 

She wasn’t going to give up though.

She couldn’t.

Laura knew there were a few other job options that she hadn’t explored yet, but she really didn’t want to get involved with any of that but sometimes, as she lay curled up with her blanket in what she had claimed as her little corner of the building she let herself think about it.

She wasn’t desperate enough- yet- to consider selling her body on the corner to some scary man but there was always the chance she could become a drug runner for her mom or whoever her mom was getting her drugs from. It’s not like they would ever suspect little innocent Laura to be carrying, right? It’s something she had found herself thinking about lately and even though it was a horrible option, she felt a little better knowing that if things got worse for her, she would have something to fall back on. Even if it was a slippery slope that would likely get her in trouble.

Her mother still wouldn’t let her back in the house- she’d checked, repeatedly- but only because of Laura’s lack of approval of her lifestyle. She’d even gone so far as to imply that she’d be happy to have Laura back if she could make herself “useful” to her which had ended in a big fight where Laura questioned her mother on if she ever actually loved her and her father or not. Laura had stopped listening after “of course I did! But…”

It was tempting to just do what her mother wanted, sure, but there was the issue of all the “friends” of hers she was letting stay at the house now that Laura really didn’t want to be around. They all looked like they had been through hell and while Laura really wasn’t normally the one to judge, she knew these people were into some crazy things and she didn’t want to be a part of it. 

Despite everything, she still had high hopes to go to college or at least be successful at something and ending up in jail for a drug related crime would put a very big hamper on her plans. 

So, she was going to do her best to avoid that altogether. 

Things had to start looking up for her at some point, didn’t they? 

With a sigh, Laura finished repacking her bag after her shower and swung it onto her back roughly, not even noticing that she nearly took out the girl next to her.

“Jesus, watch where you are swinging that thing!”

Laura scrambled back away from the girl with a yelp, in the two weeks she had been coming here she had only seen one other woman here and that woman had been so high on something she hadn’t even noticed Laura, or anyone else for that matter so she definitely wasn’t expecting anyone to be around, let alone talk to her.

“S-Sorry! I didn’t know anyone else was around.”

“Whatever,” the dark haired girl huffed and turned away from Laura, going to unlock the locker that was two down from Laura’s and began stripping off her shirt that Laura only now noticed was wet with sweat. 

_People actually work out this late?_ Laura thought before realizing that it was super inappropriate to stare at the woman and quickly rushed out the door, heading back “home”. 

Laura curled up in her thick blanket that early morning, dreaming about a better life, not knowing what she had just set in motion.


End file.
